“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every impurity.

With their

Absolutely not! God must be true, even if everyone is a liar, as it is written:

That You may be justified in Your words
and triumph when You judge.

For there is nothing reliable in what they say;

destruction is within them;
their throat is an open grave;
they flatter with their tongues.

May the Lord cut off all flattering lips
and the tongue that speaks boastfully.

The words of his mouth are malicious and deceptive;
he has stopped acting wisely and doing good.

Like a sharpened razor,
your tongue devises destruction,
working treachery.

I am surrounded by lions;
I lie down with those who devour men.
Their teeth are spears and arrows;
their tongues are sharp swords.

For your hands are defiled with blood
and your fingers, with iniquity;
your lips have spoken lies,
and your tongues mutter injustice.

They bent their tongues like their bows;
lies and not faithfulness prevail in the land,
for they proceed from one evil to another,
and they do not take Me into account.
This is the Lord’s declaration.

Didn’t you see a false vision and speak a lying divination when you proclaimed, ‘This is the Lord’s declaration,’ even though I had not spoken?

Brood of vipers! How can you speak good things when you are evil? For the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart.

So too, though the tongue is a small part of the body, it boasts great things. Consider how large a forest a small fire ignites.

The poison

Their wine is serpents’ venom,
the deadly poison of cobras.

yet the food in his stomach turns
into cobras’ venom inside him.

They make their tongues
as sharp as a snake’s bite;
viper’s venom is under their lips.Selah

General references

Their quiver is like an open grave;
they are all mighty warriors.